AM I really disabled?

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How have you bridged the gap between being included but still feeling left out?

Name: Gary Roberts
Email: jg86@hotmail.Com
Date: 22 Feb 2000
Time: 00:17:10

Story

I remember when I first became deaf which was on my seventeenth birthday. I drifted off to sleep one night and woke up the next morning deaf. I was, of course, sick also and was some time recovering.

First of all I had stopped school when I turned fifteen and I did not have the cognitive ability to think deeply about what had happened to me. My life had been lived in a the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. A culture that tolerated disabled people but viewed us in many cases as afflictions put on the parents due to sin. We were a burden that a parent had to shoulder.

I think today of when I first came aware that I was deaf and disabled. Is there a moment of awareness like a baptism and a rebirth? I think in learning to cope I just gradually acquired a self concept which centered around my deafness. One of the things that deafness did was drop me into deaf culture. I was not ready to deal with that deep of an implication of my new disability and the school for the deaf I ended up in was not ready to deal with me.

I am aware that most individuals with disabilities do not have the opportunity to drop into a subculture. That most disabilities come with terrible stigma from which there are no easy escape for the individual. We deaf people had role models -- people who were deaf and successful and extended a hand or give advice to a new comer. In time, I came to feel I belonged, but I never quite gained the full membership that others have in deaf culture.

I gained strength and acceptance from other deaf people. Too often those two things are denied those with disabilities and I have come over the last ten years or so to see the new deaf person coming out of mainstream programs. I was told time and time again that I was deaf and the only thing I could not do was hear.

The last eighteen years I worked in vocational rehabilitation dealing with general populations and I became aware of how little was expected of people with significant disabilities. I also started to see many deaf people coming out of public schools who could not read, could not write, could not sign or talk. This was a generation of disabled deaf people with whom I had no identity with and no real understanding of.

I am not saying that the residential schools were great centers of academia. I am saying that most deaf people who came out of them had the essential ingredients they needed to live and succeed in the world. I also saw so many other disabled people who had achieved nothing in public schools and of whom nothing was expected.You can not impact someone with motivation when it is not a concept that the person has ever encountered.

Special education is a barren wasteland of abuse and neglect and incompetence. I was for twenty three years a professional and a teacher and now for the last five years I have been an advocate and a community action person. I was and am today a very good rehabilitation counselor. I became convinced with time that the agency I worked for was the obstacle that frustrated the free expression of my clients and their abilities to pursue their dreams.

Coming out of rehab and winning an EEOC complaint on the issue of reasonable accommodations was for me a rite of passage from within to the outside. In truth I had always been an outsider even when I was within the agency. I was never trusted because I would not take the steps to isolate myself from the community of individuals with disabilities. I reached out to those with all disabilities and tried to have a meaningful impact. So my journey from being non-disabled to disabled and through rehabilitation as a client and later as a provider was a rite of passage and a coming of maturity.

AM I really disabled?

Story

Last changed: October 20, 2003